Breakfast for Two
by MuddyWolf
Summary: Lucca ponders death over a bowl of poi.


Legal Stuff: Lucca and everyone else are property of Square. Enjoy?

6/13/05

Breakfast for Two

By Blue9Tiger

The big pile of swirling goop was missing something. She had examined it over and over, tasting it again and again, getting more and more drunk with each sip---or at least she was supposed to. Maybe her stomach had gotten used to the Mystic Mountain diet: poi, poi, and more poi.

But it didn't have any bugs! Those guaranteed that it would be a genuine imitation of the Ioka staple.

But where were the ones that had been unchanged for millions of years?

She stuck her head out the window, hoping to catch one of the flies in flight with enough timing. There it was. A fat black one, buzzing laboriously within an arm's reach. It didn't take a painstaking analysis of the insect for the girl to conclude that the bugs from 1000 A.D. wouldn't even be able to breed with the ones from 65000000 B.C.--

But a bug in the end was a bug, and it was practically a crime to eat poi without bugs.

She caught the fly and dropped it in the poi. The liquid entangled its wings and she drowned it unceremoniously, pinching its wings together so they would get stuck and entangled in the clinging substance. Hey--that was pretty gruesome. Kinda ironic...that she, a civilized young lady from the 11th century practicing the barbarisms lauded and considered a mark of pride and honor in 65000000 B.C. But she liked bugs as much as frogs, so it didn't--really--mat--ter.

It was today, wasn't it?

Coincidentally the toads outsidegot obnoxiously loud.

The final skirmishes between humans and their allies and Mystics before the great truce. The Mystics were demoralized without the Great Ozzie, but that didn't stop them from taking out one more on the human side.

Hadn't they just changed one event? They beat Ozzie.  
When she returned Frog to his own time she thought everything had returned to normal.  
But damnit, Lucca! For all your genius you couldn't see it coming! One thing leads to another! If you change one point in history, you change it all!

If this battle is prevented---King Guardia somehow contracts a fatal disease before Marle is conceived. If the disease is cured, the King gives the throne to Marle and Crono before their time: the 1005 attack encompasses Chroas as well as the Zenan continent. Porre establishes a brutal governent. And it goes on and on.

Another way to prevent it? Convince Frog to move away. The battle is fought. The Mystics win. The Mystics crush Porre before they expand and they subjugate humans.

She sweated and groaned over each failed option, a maddening thought always in her brain:

Did he have to be--the pivotal character in the Entity's play!

In fury and despair she had dismantled the Epoch. There would be no way to save Frog without causing an even larger catastrophe. It would be one life for a lot. It was selfish. It was wrong. She couldn't do it.

The poly-rhythm of the Ioka drums pounded dizzily in her head. She wouldn't be surprised if her screwing around with the Middle Ages changed the Prehistoric Era too.

But changed history or not,

They were still all gone.

Except for Robo: she smiled fondly at her mini-model of R-66Y, Prometheus.  
Now that Frog was gone, that intricate system of steel, wiring, electronics, oil--technically lifeless yet so alive to her, was her only companion now.

Though the sun was bright as the shard of Sun stone that was the Wondershot, it wasn't penetrating the ground that she landed on as she hopped heavily out of the doorway.

It was an eerie feeling...to think that you might be standing on where your friend died.

She had fast-fowarded time--had jumped into the Epoch and chanced on seeing each of their eventual deaths.

She had witnessed Ayla's end, dying with honor in battle during the last days of the warm climate. Kino followed like the faithful husband he was. They did not get a warrior's funeral, however: the last thing she felt when she was firing up the Epoch was a burning cold. The Ioka wouldn't be prepared for the Ice Age. She didn't feel like watching the death of the whole tribe.  
Frog was there.

She poked around the mountains and searched the skies for Magus in both the Dark and Middle Ages, but if he wasn't dead, he had vanished from the face of the earth and all records.  
Frog was still there.

She went to the future that she had helped to secure--she didn't want to see the day that Robo stopped working.  
Frog was still there.

Knowing the Middle Ages was far more turbulent than any of the times she had visited, she had taken especial care that nothing else had changed in the Middle Ages. And then--by the cruel whim of SOMETHING--- maybe the Entity--Lucca witnessed another Mystic-human skirmish in 605 A.D. that had never happened before--never happened before they changed history.

Maybe it was a trade-off: Frog's life for the eventual peace in all eras.

She had a time machine but wasn't any fortune teller.

She left 600 A.D. and dismantled the Epoch. The birds sang and the frogs croaked.

Lucca had left the poi stagnating on the table. She left Truce and headed southward, across the wooden bridge that had seen Guardia clash against undead hordes, around Fiona's forest that Robo had nurtured for 400 years, and to the clump of trees that once was called the Cursed Woods. They had buried what remained of him here, a few Guardia soldiers, without a headstone. His heroisms were forgotten--his knighthood all but an empty title. His only mourners were Gnashers and Nus.

And her. But it somehow doesn't matter 400 years later. Too late to mourn dust, anyway.

Isn't that what becomes of everyone? she asked herself, staring at the empty shaded spot on the dirt. She picked up a handful of it, let it run between her fingers--let her touch Frog again, despite his silence--the dust couldn't say all the archaic "thees" and "thous" and this dust couldn't leap up, sword flying, and slice through an enemy with strokes more elegant than any human.

Same for Ayla's dust. All that brute strength, that power, that I-give-up-when-I'm-dead resolve-- where was it now?

Her being a scientist, familiar with the universal laws, knew that they had to go SOMEWHERE. They didn't simply disappear into nothing.

It's so hard to find them if they're a million tiny particles of dust...

Even she--where would her brain, her ingenuity and genius--go?

In 2300, Crono and Marle and her would be gone, she knew that. But the how she didn't really want to know before it was time and the why no amount of hypothesizing would find a straight answer.

It seemed, out of all of them, Magus would be the only one to escape becoming dust before the next Millenial Fair. But even then, only the Entity would know his fate in a million years.

It suddenly disturbed her in a way that her calculating mind didn't let it perturb before.

When Ayla was alive, none of them were born yet. When Magus was still Janus, Ayla was dead. But in her own time, she was still alive. When Frog was alive, Schala was dead, but alive in her own time. And now that Crono, Marle, and her were alive, Frog was dead, and Robo hadn't been built yet...

In each pocket of time, someone was alive--outside of it, they're dead and don't exist anymore or don't exist yet. Somehow all of these pockets are separate, unique, but unified, and evertyhing has to happen for us to arrive at the present that we know.

It's all just a system--a delicate system, she decided, closing her fist on the dust. They all had to die sometime-- Wars and military takeovers had to happen---catastrophes, apocalypses--it all had to happen to keep the equation balanced.

But if she had helped delay the world's destruction by Lavos---their interference hadn't been for entirely nothing.

She looked out towards the north, across the lush foliage and the shrine nestled in the thriving forest.

Lucca found herself with the dust still in her hand when she got to the bubbling gourd of poi, now swamped with flies drowning in the substance. She stood by the window and leaned out, grabbing the container from the table she had left it on earlier.

Another thing about poi was that you couldn't eat it alone.

Without much warning, the girl opened her hand and let the grains of Frog mix in with the flies and the food. Hardly something you would expect from a scientist, but if they could weigh a soul--then Frog would have to be with her, and they would eat the poi together.

End


End file.
